Chapter 10: Motivation and African-American Youth: Exploring Assumptions of Some Contemporary Motivation Theories

School children in the United States are surrounded by messages of both self-sufficiency and equal opportunity. Our contemporary media and history texts are replete with stories such as Horatio Alger, a poor immigrant who, through hard work and determination, was able to “pull himself up by his bootstraps,” as well as those of Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas, two men, Caucasian and African-American, born into modest homes, who rose to the highest ranks of the United States Government. Stories such as these suggest that one’s failure to thrive is a direct result of having little personal motivation to achieve. However, while these stories represent a piece of the shared context in which US students grow, learn, and develop, there are wide variations in the educational and economic opportunities afforded to our children, variations which are often a function of what Bronfenbrenner (1979) calls “macro-contexts” that include geography, social class, race/ethnicity, and gender. It is not hard to imagine how macro contextual factors such as poverty and racism, as well as micro-contextual factors such as teaching quality and curriculum, effect the extent to which students are in fact exposed to equal opportunity, or to benefits of hard work. Yet, as with many psychological theories, theories of motivation sometimes presume that the internal mechanisms governing people’s behavior develop and operate in a shared or neutral context, or limit the study of context effects to classrooms and schools. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that motivation theories have had limited success in addressing one of our nation’s most persistent educational crises: the disproportionately high rates of school “drop out,” and comparative academic underachievement of African-American youth living in our nation’s cities (Pungello, Kupersmidt, Burchinal, & Patterson, 1996; Ramey & Ramey, 1992; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carter, 1994). In this chapter, we introduce some recent work that has attempted to incorporate some elements of cultural context into motivation theories in order to better understand the motivation and achievement patterns of African-American youth. The discussion focuses on the role of self-esteem and values in the development of motivated behavior.